Jim Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, has been predicting today’s financial catastrophe for a few years now so it’s no surprise that his blog is loading slowly this morning. The people want to know: What’s going to happen next?

What the
mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is
building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot
the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great
Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the
problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of
the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the
oil problem — since oil is the primary resource of industrial
economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate
"wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is
no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital
investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the
Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place
— to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth
out of… nothing!